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Tibetans in China Protest Proposed Curbs on Their Language

BEIJING — Thousands of Tibetan students in western China have protested since Tuesday against proposals to curb or eliminate the use of the Tibetan language in local schools, according to reports from Tibet advocacy groups and photographs and video of the protests circulating on the Internet.

The protests are the largest in Tibetan areas since the March 2008 uprising that began in Lhasa and spread across the Tibetan plateau. But unlike those protests, these have been peaceful and have involved mostly students.

A protest against the proposed policies was also held in Beijing on Friday afternoon, drawing hundreds of Tibetan students at a prominent university that specializes in teaching ethnic minorities, according to witness reports and photographs.

The widespread protests over language reveal the deep resentment that many Tibetans feel over policies formulated by the Han, China’s dominant ethnic group, that Tibetans say are diluting their culture. Many Tibetans in western China also complain of strict controls over the practice of Tibetan Buddhism, including a ban on images of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, and large-scale Han migration to Tibetan towns. The Han end up taking many jobs that would otherwise go to Tibetans.

Photographs distributed by Free Tibet, based in London, show students in uniforms taking to the streets in Rebkong. Some photos show the students walking by a monastery and monks joining the rally. Rebkong is the seat of Rongwo Monastery, a 700-year-old center of scholarship that is home to about 400 monks who regularly display photos of the Dalai Lama and openly criticize government policies they consider overbearing. The principal of a primary school in Huangzhong County, northwest of Tongren, confirmed by telephone that peaceful protests had taken place.

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Students in Rebkong appeared to have returned to classes by Wednesday. But inspired by those rallies, hundreds and perhaps thousands of teenagers from several schools in the Tibetan town of Chabcha, known in Chinese as Gonghe, took to the streets on Wednesday morning. One photo shows more than 100 students dashing through the streets; another shows policemen in white hats watching a group of students as one raises his left fist defiantly. On Thursday, students in the town of Tawo, or Dawu in Chinese, also protested. By 2 p.m., the police were preventing people from going out into the streets of Tawo, according to Free Tibet.

Posts on the Internet said 400 Tibetan students held a rally on Friday on the campus of Minzu University of China, the specialized school in Beijing. Photographs showed a large group of students gathered on a concrete walkway lined with shrubs. Other photos showed uniformed guards milling around some students.

The traditional mission of Minzu University is to train students from ethnic minority regions of China who might then return to those regions and work for the government. Departments in the university specialize in scholarship on various cultures in China, and more than 600 Tibetans study on the campus. Telephone calls on Friday afternoon to several offices at the university went unanswered.

The protests in Qinghai erupted over speculation that government officials plan to severely limit the teaching of Tibetan in schools, perhaps relegating it to elective or extracurricular status. On Sept. 30, People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, ran an article quoting Qiang Wei, the party secretary of Qinghai Province, as saying in a speech at a Sept. 13 education conference that mandating Chinese language instruction was crucial.

“Officials at all levels must overcome all your worries, overcome the wrong idea that to adopt common language education for minority students will hurt minority people’s feelings or affect the development of minority culture or affect social stability,” he said. The article provided tinder for the protests.

Woeser, a Tibetan blogger who lives in Beijing, circulated a cellphone text message on Friday that said: “In order save our mother tongue, many Tibetan students are protesting in Tibetan areas advocating for the Tibetan language. We need your attention.”

The message also said that if ethnic Han who are Cantonese speakers can protest to defend the use of Cantonese, then Tibetans should have the right to defend their language. That referred to protests in July in the city of Guangzhou in which Cantonese assailed a local politician’s proposal to force prominent programs on a local television network to stop broadcasting in Cantonese and switch to Mandarin.

Zhang Jing contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on October 23, 2010, on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Tibetan Area
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